The face North Korea tries to present to the world is of a happy and self-sufficient nation that adores its boyish young leader, Kim Jong Un, and regularly assembles in mass demonstrations to display its military might.

It has long been obvious that the reality inside the world's most reclusive nation — where radios and TVs come pre-set to government stations, and dissenters and their families disappear into labor camps — is quite different.

But the world has rarely seen a picture of the nation's sordid underbelly as detailed as the one in a new United Nations report on North Korea's repressive system and political prison camps, where the cruelty nearly defies belief:

A pregnant woman forced to return to North Korea after trying to defect gives birth and begs to keep her baby, but a guard repeatedly beats her until, in the words of a witness, "with her shaking hands she picked up the baby and she put the baby face-down in the water. The baby stopped crying."

Prisoners regularly starve to death, and those who survive do so by eating anything they can, including snakes, mice and grass.

Prisoners are routinely tortured by being beaten, handcuffed and hung in the air, or forced to stand for hours on tip-toe in cold water so deep that they can barely keep their mouths and noses above water.

The report is the work of a U.N. commission that spent almost a year interviewing hundreds of witnesses, including former inmates and prison guards who managed to escape. The camps, sealed off in the mountainous countryside, hold an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 prisoners, enough to fill the largest stadiums in America. The authors say hundreds of thousands have died in the camps over the decades.

The report is meant to prick the world's conscience, to take away the excuse of ignorance. But it also serves as a reminder of how impotent other nations have been in trying to stop North Korea's longstanding abuses.

North Korea's military ability to retaliate against nearby Seoul, the capital of South Korea, means any armed attack on the north could have terrible consequences, including full-scale war with the United States, which is committed to defending South Korea and has stationed thousands of troops there since the Korean War. Kim's small arsenal of nuclear weapons would also be in play.

Just as important, North Korea enjoys substantial protection from its neighbor China, which fears a wave of refugees if North Korea's government falls, and values the north as a buffer against South Korea and the United States. It's widely expected that China would use its Security Council seat to veto any move to try North Korea's leaders in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, a step recommended in the U.N. report.

Perhaps there's not much that can be done short of regime change, but the civilized world should do what it can. That means continuing to document the horrors, denying international legitimacy to the regime through economic sanctions and other means, and calling out its enablers. At some point, the tide of history will turn against Kim and his murderous thugs.

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